Day 1

of a New Year.

After about 4.5 hrs of sleep and a headful of songs I didn't know I knew (thanks, Rockband), I slowly got up and crawled into my running clothes. This was a new year! My dog needed exercise and I needed some sort of something which seemed most obtainable out of doors. A couple of miles would do, and that's all we can usually manage in slush.

The snow was greasy; there was almost no true slush. We went beyond a couple of miles, past the plows where there was snow, obligingly packed down by other people, but still white and crisp. Almost everything was white, the path, the river, the sky, the trees: I don't think I've had a new year that was such a blank page before...well, not quite blank. There were many little animal tracks, some of which my dog rolled on (before dropping a few commas). So many smells! He was like a puppy going in so many directions simultaneously. I felt I was missing something, but not in a bad way. It was like being illiterate in a foreign country which can be (unsettling but also) amazingly intense, the quotidian blurred and the significant distilled. And if there is nothing significant, there is very little to distract from simply being there. I ran in a fog of white, insensitive to sensations, or time, or effort, and I felt not like a person with running goals or New Years resolutions nor even like a person, really, just an interchangeable collection of atoms occupying space amidst other atoms, occasionally coalescing to tell my dog to slow down.

For me, that is comforting. I sometimes get too wrapped up in what's going on, this date or that chore, like everybody else does, and has to. This is being productive. But it is good balance to be a sponge sometimes too, not just in terms of absorbing important knowledge, but also to become so tenuously differentiated from the environment that what is outside is pretty much also inside.

Which leads me to my first haphazard resolution. I didn't think of this during this run (I didn't think of anything at all--it was an hour-long brain wipe), but it's something I've been mulling over for a while. I'm going to try to buy less stuff, specifically cheap stuff which is produced far away. I haven't set any parameters apart from not buying a load of junk at the local Kansas Walmart once we move there. Already I'm thinking about needing a scrub brush because I left my old one behind to clean up the house, but is there an alternative? Something in my parents' basement which they don't need, or something which I actually already own but haven't used? Or there is a more expensive but more durable brush which I can buy once and keep for ages?

My second resolution is to get healthier. Which also includes running a bit more.

5.38 miles this morning, then Bodyrock. I was a bit disappointed to not find a New Year workout, but since I haven't done all of the 12 days of Christmas yet, I can't be too demanding.